Tate Talk #14: Mastering Linked Citation

In today’s Tate Talk I’m talking about citation using links, which is a method of incorporating outside sources into your annotations.

Well-used citations can make your arguments ironclad and can open up an artist or topic to your reader. One of the dopest things about annotating on Genius is that we can refer to our sources without disrupting the flow of the writing–and, therefore, the reader’s focus. Since @JohnGanz has already written an excellent Tate Talk on Research, I’m going to focus on the composition of elegant and effective linked citations, and especially on cool techniques which aren’t seen frequently on the site. Let’s jump in.

Materials to reference in linked citations:

Internal pages: These are songs, artist pages, annotations, poems, articles, and other texts housed on Genius. These appear often in bios, but they are also extremely useful for unpacking a literary allusions, interpolated song lyrics, and to back up references within an artist’s oeuvre.

External pages: This is your most common and broadest category. External citation brings in news and pop culture interviews, evidence for analysis, digitally published expert information, and almost anything else you can imagine. These can also be links to texts which are published digitally to which Genius doesn’t have the rights (for example, the poems of T.S. Eliot).

Devices and definitions: A somewhat hybrid category, here we have specialized terms not typically used in everyday language, but which would be unwieldy to unpack in the space of a definition. So, we use both internal and external sources to provide our reader with the information necessary to absorb the annotation’s meaning.

Books: The most exotic of linked citations, these are links directly to sections scanned books which contain information which is extremely specific and often hard to come by in digital publications.

How to make linked citations like a boss:

Your goal, with every citation, is to improve your argument (factually and/or rhetorically and provide information to your reader. With that in mind, let’s take a look at an example of each type of referenced material to see what makes it tick.

Internal Pages

Internal pages help to locate your reader in the geography of an artist’s work, offering them a map to navigate from song to song through time or content.
Here, @drxw uses internal pages less directly than simply referring to songs by name:

This tate depends completely on connections to other Weeknd songs to make its point. They transform a bare-bone explanation of the lyric content into a interwoven set of recurring themes in Tesfaye’s work. @drxw selects referents in his annotation which are already grammatically distinct so that they don’t disrupt the reader’s flow.

External Pages

One of the coolest things about Genius is the amount of information we can pack into an annotation without making it crowded or clunky – to an extent which is impossible in print media. External linkage is a huge part of this:

Again, it’s all about concision. In 2-3 sentences, @Theonlydjorkaeff uses 3 different articles to give the reader all the information she needs to understand Desiigner’s Panda simile. The referent selected to link to each article corresponds logically with its target site, so the reader knows exactly what information is coming from where. Because the informatiom from the original source is immediately available, there’s not need to say “According to Autotrader,” or provide other direction which would complicate the tate.

Devices & Definitions

Sometimes, you want to enrich you annotation with some specialized information while avoiding being long-winded or sounding like a condescending asshole. So, ideally, you incorporate a literary term or reference a theory in passing with a link, offering your reader an opportunity to explore at their will without shoving, say, ten minutes of involuted scansion down their throats. This lets the annotation stay concise while still being incredibly rich, and gives the reader control of their own understanding.

Here, @jayclay uses a combination of internal and external sources to illuminate Newsom’s complex rhetorical structure. The referent for each term is restricted to the term, differentiating them from the links to the Guardian article and the Vonnegut short story. This allows the reader to skip the links if they’re familiar with the terms, or check them out if they’d like more info.

Books

Linked references to books are the least common type of reference I see on Genius. I’d like to make a case for them, however, especially in cases of ultra-specific, specialized information. Forgive me for using my own tate as an example, but I couldn’t find another one:

Here, the final link is a quote from a book devoted to historical information about Renaissance Literature. When making the tate, I knew I wanted to refer to the Early Modern usage of “table,” and vaguely remembered the process but couldn’t find anything published online which explained it. After googling “gesso table Renaissance literature” and restricting my search to Google Books, I was led to the specific page in the book which explained the tables. Voila: a digitally viewable print source where the reader is connected directly to the page containing the information they need.

Closing

When properly employed, linked citations offer unique concision to Genius annotations; they come in all shapes and sizes, and can be formatted to enhance your reader’s experience without distracting from the content of your annotation.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any tates which you think exemplify other types of citation which I might have missed? Any tips or techniques you’d like to show off? I’d love to hear them.

Awesome. Linking without hiding information behind a click, but also w/out cluttering the tate is a fine art.

I actually experimented a fair bit with Lit Genius and Shakespeare tates as I wanted to make the citations easily accessible to people writing essays for high school / college level, leading to the system below:

really loving this :) sometimes i do directly reference specific songs (contradicting point #1) just for the sake of clarity but i think consideration of flow is definitely a good thing to do. v good job, @seaeffess :)